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How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

theguardian.com

81–90 of 396 posts

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. I follow a number of subreddits on topics ranging from baseball, local news (city subreddits), credit card churning, maps, history, and many others. None of them have been affected by /r/the_donald.

I agree with you and think the hubbub around r/the_donald is amusing. In my opinion, r/the_donald is a "beautiful" example of mob trolling. If a subreddit doesn't interest you, just unfollow it. If you are browsing /r/all, you're probably procrastinating anyways!

ironically, the_donald is just one subreddit while there are literally dozens of specifically anti-the_donald subreddits that people complain about having to unfollow

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#82
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. This exactly the kinda of propaganda you should be aware of. /r/the_donald specifically exists to spread false information, and to dox and harass people. /r/politics is opinionated because of it's user base. It's not intentionally a propaganda machine.

And /r/the_donald would say just the opposite. The thing about propaganda – why it works so well – is that it's presented as authentic civil discourse. There's no clear cut demarcation between the two types of speech. One could argue that /r/the_donald uses the banhammer to maintain order (the narrative), and /r/politics uses shill comments+downvoting to do the same.

> The thing about propaganda – why it works so well – is that it's presented as authentic civil discourse.

so many people don't realize this. if you can tell it's propaganda on the face, it's shitty propaganda.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#83
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started thinking of Reddit that way, but once you start thinking about it that way, it's a pretty crappy software solution. A platform for diverse communities with a single SSO solution and frictionless cross-community posting combined with limited moderation features, poor ban capabilities, and easy discovery? That's not a good software recipe for a community to become empowered or build their own space at all.

Its already proven itself to be a great recipe for communities and empowerment...it's literally the best the world has ever seen. Hacker News even uses it's format...

It has also proven to be incredibly vulnerable to manipulation when people discover how to leverage money into vote manipulation and moderator takeover. All of the political subreddits very quickly became cesspools of propaganda during the course of the last presidential election, and this has only increased since. Many of my favorite political subreddits are just dead now.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#84
post #62

What I find fascinating and disappointing is how much the opioid crisis isn't being talked about or addressed proportional to other societal issues. Billions of dollars of private research being poured into self-driving cars by our greatest minds and millions of dollars in lobbying against gun laws all in the name of preventing unnecessary human deaths... yet according to Ben Bernanke (and his references), opioid ove…

While I agree that a lot more funds for treatment are needed to fight the opioid epidemic, it is really a fundamentally different problem that road fatalities. The only thing they really have in common are the fatalities.

The opioid crisis seems like a symptom of our social problems (hopelessness in the rust belt, unscrupulous over-prescribing of pain meds) that has fatal consequences.

Short of a drug that provided a permanent cure for opioid addiction itself, I'm not sure what sort of solutions can be pursued by scientific/tech research, as opposed to addressing the root social causes.

I'm interested in what ideas others might have though.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#85
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has some fantastic and fascinating communities and really interesting cult-like ones (/r/nofap) However I'd like to point out the admin policy towards hate groups and speech on reddit is in my opinion incredibly dangerous and damaging to our society. They will take action against subreddits like FPH (fat people hate) because of "real life" actions, meawhile there are thousands of highly upvoted calls to violen…

You seem to recognize reddit is mostly a set of somewhat independent community, yet view it as a problematic site for ‘minorities’. Did you face significant hurdles when only participating to subreddits that had decently behaved users ? I think at this point reddit is almost a good representation of the internet, and getting out of reddit because of shitty subs feels like taking distance from internet because of 4cha…

parent explicitly mentions people making racial jokes and mentioning racial stereotypes. This occurs even in every large subreddit, well-behaved or not. They likely aren't even malicious on the part of the people who say them, but nevertheless, they are damaging comments to make, and I wouldn't blame people for leaving reddit because of them.

that said there are plenty of small communities that are pleasant, sure. But some people would rather go elsewhere than take the time and effort to curate their subs, and that's perfectly reasonable.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has some fantastic and fascinating communities and really interesting cult-like ones (/r/nofap) However I'd like to point out the admin policy towards hate groups and speech on reddit is in my opinion incredibly dangerous and damaging to our society. They will take action against subreddits like FPH (fat people hate) because of "real life" actions, meawhile there are thousands of highly upvoted calls to violen…

Violent, hateful, disgusting speech has no place in civil discourse but it's irreplaceable in public discourse. That's kinda the problem. As a species, our entire communications spectrum can't be forced into either bucket. It has to exist in both. The kind of things I wouldn't tolerate at all around my family I'm fine tolerating around my friends. And the kind of things I wouldn't tolerate from a friend I'm fine tole…

The commenter you replied to may have a point. Just because vile speech has a place in public discourse, doesn't mean it is good to present that speech in a very public way.

Reddit is among the most widely-used websites in the world -- 7th, by Alexa's rankings. Reddit lives up to its motto of being the front page of the internet.

Imagine one of the top-10 newspapers in the United States were occasionally publishing stuff from /r/The_Donald on its front page, and had content from various hateful sub-reddits a few pages back. You could argue that this imaginary publication harms society.

Of course, Reddit is not the New York Times. So different standards apply. But the argument that Reddit -- and thus its administrators policies -- may be harming society, seems to hold some weight.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You basically justified the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. You have to take the bad with the good, because we don't all agree on what's good.

First amendment only applies to what the government can do. Private companies like Reddit, Facebook and Google have no responsibility to let you speak on their platform. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a…

Free Speech != The First Amendment

The First Amendment is just a law which prevents the US government from restricting Free Speech. Free Speech itself is a principle which can be applied anywhere.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#88
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has been demonstrated time and time again that it is subject to, and vulnerable to, blatant manipulation and propganda. Whether it's a celebrity endoresement masquerading as an interview, threads defending corporations and/or their actions, the manufacturing of consent, the anti-democractic activities of shill accounts, or being subject to blanket disinformation, Reddit is a net-negative to society in my opini…

You know, even the military monitors reddit to keep on top of new trends and ideas. It has really become a social force, and that's why I agree with you, it is ripe for manipulation. > Reddit is a net-negative to society in my opinion. I did not agree with this before, but after /r/the_donald, I am re-considering my position.

It's not just the_donald, sandersforpresident was literally shut down and scattered by shill mods after the election, despite having a community several hundred thousand strong of people ready to mobilize for progressive values. Arguably the central force that made Sanders such a phenomenon in the election was taken over and destroyed in the matter of a couple months. Incredibly chilling when you think about it. I think the worst mistake people can make is assuming this is just about alt-right meme factories. It is much more about the manipulation of self-described centrists to keep them pro-corporate, and divided on superficial issues (ie the same as it has always been, they are figuring out how to port their TV strategy to the internet, it is just taking some time).

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#89
post #39
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike Twitter because the medium is so crappy,and has crappy effects on discourse. By contrast every summary dismissal I've heard of reddit revolves around overgeneralizing from portions of raw humanity, as you say.

Reddit does pretty well as a conversational medium, but not for a medium to retain information. Unlike a traditional forum with long-running threads that get bumped to the top, many subreddits suffer from newcomers asking the same questions every other week (there's only two stickied threads, and people usually don't bother with the wiki). In addition, the notion of karma encourages unwanted behavior like recycling c…

Perhaps it's also worth talking about imageboards.

Imageboards also suffer from newcomers asking the same questions, though this is mitigated by third party archive sites and encouragement to use them, to the point in which a common reply to a newbie question will be "search the archive". There are only about 15 pages of threads (with about 10 threads on each page) active at a time, which is significantly less than on a subreddit. You cannot reply to deleted threads, but individual threads can reach around 350 replies if they're baity/good.

Imageboards have no notion of karma, except social. You usually (save for boards with in-thread IDs) can be an expert on one topic in a thread, then ask a newbie question later on, letting you also play devil's advocate. This is because you can be anonymous. But if you want to attach your name to your posts, you can do so securely using a code which nobody can replicate unless they also know the password to generate it that you know (a tripcode). People who use tripcodes are frequently derided (such as by being called "tripfags").

Imageboards are relatively easy to use. You post a thread using a form at the top of each board page, and reply to a thread using the same form at the top of the thread page, which is accessed by clicking "Reply" displayed next to an individual thread on the board pages.

Imageboards usually host multiple boards. 4chan for example has a board for most topics people are interested in, from anime, technology and toys to papercraft, transportation and the paranormal. Within these boards, it is common to have "general" threads in which they act like miniature boards, threads created for just one topic, however they are not moderated, as they are set up by regualar users, so they can go off-topic. For example, /g/ (the Tech board) has a frequent general thread called "/tpg/ - Thinkpad general" in which people can talk about IBM Thinkpad laptops. Multiple people can create topical threads with the same subject line.

Other imageboards let you create your own board, the most prominent example of which is 8chan; by creating a board you become its moderator and administrator, subject to the global rules of the website, of course.

Imageboards, like Reddit, have a feedback loop in which commenting in a thread will bump it to the top of the board, so people viewing the first page of the board will see that thread. Unpopular threads tend to fall in ranking until they are eventually bumped off the board by a new thread. To avoid participating in the feedback loop, you can "sage" a thread, which is to post in it, but not bump it to the top.

But most importantly I will reiterate - imageboards are anonymous, there are no accounts, and there is no barrier to participation except maybe feeling bad because you haven't lurked enough.

I'm not the first to talk about the virtues of imageboards over traditional forum stoftware (phpBB, Reddit, etc.): https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan

And this is of course ignoring that you can use an imageboard to host a personal blog, by only allowing a pre-defined administrator tripcode to post, and to set new replies to not bump threads. It's a real shame the flourish of earlier imageboards died, as they were often home to quality discussion.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#90
post #85
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to recognize reddit is mostly a set of somewhat independent community, yet view it as a problematic site for ‘minorities’. Did you face significant hurdles when only participating to subreddits that had decently behaved users ? I think at this point reddit is almost a good representation of the internet, and getting out of reddit because of shitty subs feels like taking distance from internet because of 4cha…

parent explicitly mentions people making racial jokes and mentioning racial stereotypes. This occurs even in every large subreddit, well-behaved or not. They likely aren't even malicious on the part of the people who say them, but nevertheless, they are damaging comments to make, and I wouldn't blame people for leaving reddit because of them. that said there are plenty of small communities that are pleasant, sure. Bu…

Indian user here. I avoid majority of Reddit's default sub because of this reason. Just yesterday, I accidentally came across on comment in /r/askreddit where they openly called Indian men as vulgar and rapey. When another Indian user questioned it, he was downvoted heavily. Honestly, 12 hours later, I am still angry. I think I will leave Reddit for good this time.
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